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Textured alumina ceramics with brick‐and‐mortar microstructures exhibit surprisingly high values of strength and toughness as compared to traditional ceramics. However, in full ceramic systems, pressure‐assisted sintering restricts their shaping potential, and the study of interfacial materials is still insufficient. Here, we fabricate textured alumina exhibiting elevated indentation fracture toughness using a high entropy oxide (HEO) (MgAlSiTiZr)O as the mortar. The HEO undergoes a single‐phase transformation at 1600°C, resulting in a crystallographic structure identical to that of ZrO2. Our HEO mortar is tough and has a high wetting behavior to alumina platelets used in the green body, which promotes densification via liquid phase sintering. Textured alumina ceramics with HEO mortar at concentrations varying from 0 to 90 wt% were fabricated using magnetically assisted slip casting and pressureless sintering through the templated grain growth process. A trade‐off between density and grain anisotropy led to the highest mechanical properties. Textured alumina with 10 wt% HEO exhibited over 95% relative density, an elastic modulus of 244 ± 29 GPa, a flexural strength of 329 ± 27 MPa, and an indentation fracture toughness of 6.80 ± 0.65 MPa∙m0.5, which is more than 1.9 times that of the usual polycrystalline alumina. Thanks to the mineral nature of HEO, the simplicity of the process, and the mechanical properties, the textured alumina with HEO mortar can be produced in complex shapes and could find applications in stringent environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomimicry is an interdisciplinary design approach that provides solutions to engineering problems by taking inspiration from nature. Given the established importance of biomimicry for building a sustainable world, there is a need to develop effective curricula on this topic. In this study, a workshop was conducted twice in Singapore: once with 14 students from a local high school in Singapore, and once with 11 undergraduate students in engineering from the United States. The workshop aimed to better understand how students conceptualize biomimicry following the bottom-up and top-down biomimetic methods. The workshop contained a lecture and laboratory session, and data were collected via questionnaires, field observation, and participant presentations at the end of the laboratory session. A qualitative analysis revealed that the top-down biomimetic approach was initially understood using vague and generic terms. In contrast, the students described the bottom-up approach using precise and technical vocabulary. By naming the themes highlighting the students' conceptualizations, it was concluded that strengthening the principle that makes the natural object unique and increasing interdisciplinary knowledge are needed to help them perform the top-down approach. The results from this work should be confirmed with a more significant number of participants, and they could help develop a curriculum to teach the two approaches effectively by providing tools to help the students generalize their ideas and abstract meaning from systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]